Project phases

Discovering the project accounts for the finding of the first process within a company or a department, eligible to automation, that will benefit from the full power of Bonita while providing the biggest value to the end-users once in production. This process must be core to the business of the company or department.
Eventually, this one process may be rendered by several BPMN processes, all of them handling different aspects of the business process identified.

Using Bonita Studio, anyone trained to the Business Process Model and Notation as a citizen developer or professional developer can quickly implement BPMN versions of the processes, Business Data Model, specify the documents handled by the processes, as well as create business variables in the processes.

It is also very easy to create the actors that will start the processes and execute each human task, create a sandbox organization in Bonita Studio, and then configure the mapping between each actor and the organization entities for testing purposes.
If the actor is linked to the process execution (like the same person who executed the previous task), an actor filter must be created as an extension by the professional developers and be made available to the project.

Then, for each process instantiation and human task, a contract must be defined, that state to each form what a task needs to be executed, or what the process needs to start. The information needed can be a new information to create, or an existing information to edit.
This contract will be evaluated when the form presents its output to the process.

As for the user interfaces per se, at this stage, Bonita provides auto-generated forms that allow the early testing of the process execution.

For now, connectors responses must be mocked by scripts made available by the professional developers to the project as extensions.
The exception to that could be the notifications (when a task is ready, when a task is executed), rendered in Bonita with an email connector. Configuring the email connectors could help in gathering feedback in this first implementation phase.

Bonita Studio includes an environment for testing a process locally, before deployment: when clicking Run, the embedded Runtime executes the process instances and displays the User Application by default. The choice of the default application to open can be configured.
All along this first implementation phase, feedback must be taken from the process owner and business users, through Agile sprint demonstrations as well as usability testing sessions.

In Bonita Studio, in the pools Execution properties (instantiation form and case overview), and in each human tasks Execution properties (task forms), you will find a tool that creates the first version of the forms, based on the contracts. These first versions can be customized later on.

Besides the forms, and following the findings of the UI workshops, application pages may be needed to display generic information about business data. They can also replace a form when all the user needs to do is clicking on a Approve or Reject button.+ If the project is a Case Management project, you can customize the provided project.
The create-or-modify-a-page.adoc [creation of pages] is done directly in the UI Designer embedded in Bonita Studio.

From the UI Designer, you can also define the layout of the application, although Bonita provides an efficient default Layout.
A theme can also be defined to match the graphical design charter of the company. This can be done my customizing one of Bonita’s provided themes.
The theme needs some coding (CSS, html) skills to be created or customized. Once developed in the developer’s favorite IDE, it needs to be made available to the project as an extension.

From the studio, the profiles are created to grant access to the future applications, mapping each profile with organization entities.
Defining the application then comes down to binding together project elements: a profile, some pages, a layout, and a theme.
The application descriptor also allows for the creation of a name, a URL token, the application two-level navigation and the designation of the home page.
The link between an application and the processes that run in the background is created by the BPM API called by the clickable elements contained in the pages. There is no need to formally declare such a link.

You can either create an application from scratch, or customize a Bonita application.

In this latter case, choose well, as each application is devoted to a special business need:

To customize an application to your needs:

To know about the pages that can be customized, go to the create a page documentation page.

To use a connector, it must first be declared as a dependency of the project. This is done from the Studio Extensions page. The connector can be found in Bonita Marketplace or can be made available the professional developers of the project team.
In this phase, attach the real connectors implementation to the relevant steps.
Note that it can be more efficient to split steps with both user activity and connector activity into two steps, a human task for the user and a system task for the connector.

Before you can run a process in production, you need to define your organization with entries for all process users, groups, and roles. You also need to map the process actors to the real people who will carry out process steps. This is most of the time achieved thanks to an LDAP, and system administrators will then use Bonita LDAP synchronizer.

REST API extensions, static and dynamic API security rules, BDM access control, actor filters, actor mapping, profiles need to be specified and/or double-checked at that time, to make sure that accesses are given to the right people for the right data.

This is also the time to translate the applications into all languages needed by the end-users.